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People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

theatlantic.com

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Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#41

Post by weeksie »

saulrh wrote: post #5

Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you f…

Look into John Rawls' theory of justice. It'll answer a lot of your questions.

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#42

Post by Randgalt »

The article never defines what fairness is. Another word for fairness is "justice". The article betrays its bias when it analyzes how income is "distributed". Of course, income isn't distributed - it's earned. If person A earns 100x person B then of course it's just. However, if income were indeed distributed, all things being equal, unequal distribution would not be just. So, do you believe wealth is earned by hard work and diligence or that it is distributed by some kind of greater power?

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#43

Post by jessedhillon »

nemo44x wrote: post #24

Karl Marx saw a couple flaws in Capitalism, similar to what we practice today. I think he's right about one and wrong about the other. And the part he's right about is what people find unfair. He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what b…

> He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what bothers people. It isn't fair. And they are helpless to change it.

Given your other statements, this is not a sensible position. A widget is priced according to the value it delivers a buyer -- if there are 100 brands of widgets on the market and they are easy to make, it's priced low; if I am the only widget maker, the only limit on the price is what I can convince people to pay.

And what I pay my factory workers is subject to the same competitive forces -- labor's value is limited by my ability to replace it. That's your free market in effect, labor is only extracting value for itself until it exceeds the cost of the alternative, be that a robot or another worker.

So if you are a believer that free markets deliver the best pairing of choice and freedom, how do you not look at a person working in a factory, being paid a low wage, enjoying no participation in profit, and think if they had more value to offer, they would negotiate a better deal.

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#44

Post by rayiner »

bweitzman wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #22

> A world in which everyone suffered from horrible poverty would be a perfectly equal one, he says, but few would prefer that to the world in which we now live. Therefore, “equality” can’t be what we really value. Frighteningly fallacious logic. I want a house with a pool. But I don't want one a 2-hour commute from work even if it has a pool. Does that mean I don't value the pool? Stuck through it for shits and giggl…

It does mean that the pool isn't the thing you value most though, since you value your commute more than the pool.

It depends on the shape of your preference curves. If you're a 1.5 hour commute from work, your highest value change might be a shorter commute. But if you're a 20 minute commute from work, your highest value change might be a pool.

Similarly, if you live in a rich society, you might prefer a more equal society to one that's somewhat more wealthy on average. But if you live in a poor society, you might prefer one that's wealthier even if it has more inequality. For example, the U.S. has 25-35% higher PPP GDP per capita than Germany and France. However, the ratio between the income of the top 10% and the bottom 10% is twice as wide in the U.S. as in those countries. I imagine a lot of Germans and French are okay with that state of affairs.

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#45

Post by dragonwriter »

mmanfrin wrote: post #29

I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access , not equality of 'things'. The Great American Dream is about someone seizing an opportunity; equality means we all have an opportunity to seize an opportunity. Economic Inequality means there is a disproportionate number of opportunities at the top, and very few at the bottom. Not everyone takes those chances, b…

> I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'.

The features which provide access to economic opportunities are, themselves, economic goods, and wealth is largely (though not entirely) fungible, so the two things are not entirely separable. You can't provide an equality of access that meets some common standards of fairness without finding some way to reduce the degree and circumstances in which the current system produces inequality in things.

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#46

Post by ars »

some-guy wrote: post #36
mmanfrin wrote: post #29

I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access , not equality of 'things'. The Great American Dream is about someone seizing an opportunity; equality means we all have an opportunity to seize an opportunity. Economic Inequality means there is a disproportionate number of opportunities at the top, and very few at the bottom. Not everyone takes those chances, b…

When I think of inequality and opportunity in the US, I think about the education system. Sadly, the quality of K-12 education in the United States is too strongly tied to economic output / wealth / income of a region, which seems regressive to me.

I've felt the same, and it's because schools are mostly funded by real estate taxes. Changing that model would help - even if it was something as simple as pooling all the taxes for an entire state.

The difficulty with doing that is that real estate values, and thus taxes, is a very local thing, it's quite hard to set them universally.

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#47

Post by thesteamboat »

Meh. Saying people prefer fairness over equality doesn't actually tell us much, mostly because neither of those two terms have consistent definitions that allow us to analyze whether a situation is fair or is equal.

On the one hand there's the internal division of equality of outcomes vs. equality of opportunities. (See this [in my opinion somewhat confused] article by Dylan Matthews[0]). On the other hand "it's not fair" usually seems to mean "I have been slighted".

As someone who has worked in Game Theory, I've seen a variety of notions of what constitutes fairness (in the form of social welfare). There isn't one obvious-even-if-technically-infeasible choice. There's a variety of plausible, mediocre alternatives.

I think that what this actually demonstrates is that most people have muddled thinking on most topics.

[0]: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9334215/equality-of-opportunit...

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#48

Post by dnautics »

I think the reason why people don't want equality is because it's arbitrary. To take a simple case, let's say there are five people and five apples. An "equal" distribution might distribute five apples to each person, but let's say one of them is allergic to apples. Then suddenly the "equal" distribution doesn't satisfy equally.

So how does one formulate an equal distribution, and who gets to choose those rules?

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#49

Post by nshepperd »

weeksie wrote: post #41
saulrh wrote: post #5

Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you f…

Look into John Rawls' theory of justice. It'll answer a lot of your questions.

I'll take Rawls' veil of ignorance and say yes, I'd rather be born into unequal world A than equal world B if everyone in world A has strictly more pie than in world B.

Destroying parts of the pie clearly isn't Pareto optimal, either.

Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

#50

Post by bweitzman »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #31
bweitzman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does mean that the pool isn't the thing you value most though, since you value your commute more than the pool.

Not necessarily. In this case, OP values the commute more. What if it's a tossup between a 10 minute commute with no backyard and 25 minute commute with a backyard with two trees to put a hammock on. Maybe in that case, OP would take a longer commute to get a shady backyard. I think that's why the logic is fallacious - it only works for a specific question phrased in a specific way.

Well I suppose the issue is muddled because having a pool is a binary thing where as commute time is not. That makes them hard to rank.

Suppose instead of just saying that you're choosing between a house with no pool but a short commute over a house with a pool and a long commute you try to rank your priorities:

1. Pool

2. Commute Now if the pool is really the most important thing to you, then you will have to forfeit the 1. Commute 2. Pool

3. Commute The point being that if we haven't fulfilled a certain priority, then it cannot be the most important priority. At least in this binary priority model, there are of course other ways you could lay this out. I just don't think it's fair to call the logic "frighteningly fallacious"

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